Will Gmail Leave Anything For Me To Do on My Own?

It looks like Google is absolutely positive that Gmail users are very lazy and not exactly intelligent as the Gmail team seems to be determined to help us do everything related to every single email correctly. It looks like the team has been particularly active making sure no one will even be able to make any common emailing mistakes when using the free email system by Google. There were a few examples of this activity recently with a few new features making their appearances in Labs.

First, you can remember Gmail offering to track attachments when attachments are supposed to be in the email but you forget to add them. This must have happened to just about every email user. Honestly, I still think there was some sort of intrigue to me when I got an email with an attachment promised and tried to figure out if the sender would realize absence of attachment immediately or if it would take some time. With this forgotten attachments functionality activated the intrigue is gone: Gmail can now detect words in the email body meaning that an attachment should be there and remind you about it if you click the “Send” button without adding any file to the email.

After that Gmail team added the functionality that looked more like a joke than a serious idea to many bloggers when announced - it was Mail Goggles, the feature that prevents users from sending emails they may later regret based on the time of day when they are likely to send something stupid. The feature checks if the user is sure about sending this email late on weekend nights when one’s brain may be both tired and a little clouded with alcohol - and even uses some math tests to verify that the user is not drunk and probably actually wants to send exactly this email.

Today we have yet another functionality in this field introduced to Labs - Canned Responses. This feature will remember the common things you type in reply to some common questions you get - and will help you compose an answer next time you are asked the same question. With Canned Responses a user is offered to compose the email only once and use this email as a template for all the future emails like this. What’s more, Gmail can actually apply a certain canned response to all the messages sorted out by a certain filter you have - and once an email is recognized as meeting the criteria of the filter, the feature can use the response you want it to use and even send the message for you.

In the future I guess Gmail will also help decide who to send the email with an invitation to a Friday party based on who you invited last time and will also help a cheating man not to send an email addressed to his wife to a lover instead. But still all these things leave me questioning my own intelligence and Google’s opinion about me and my intelligence again. I know such features are intended to facilitate everyone’s day to day lives but to me all these additions look like web applications will soon do pretty well without human brains behind them.

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